We still haven’t quite cracked it! The classroom is somewhat unnatural by its very nature so perhaps we never will. This book doesn’t pretend to have the answer either but it does attempt to offer some helpful techniques.
Reading through the book for the first time in many years I was struck at how fresh it seems. Fresh and, at the same time, a little bit quaint. I have tried not to meddle too much with either its freshness or its quaintness. I have made a few cuts and one or two small changes, but basically I have left it intact: I have left the original newspaper articles and made minimal changes to dialogues, role cards and so on. I have updated things where necessary – zoo prices, for example, have gone up from £1.60 in 1979 to £16.80 in 2009 – and
I have replaced the photographs, which looked dated, even though teachers will of course be able to download their own visual material from the Internet these days.
The use of the pronoun ‘he’ (practically throughout) irritated me a lot so I have dealt with that. I have also made changes to the tense used in some instances, as what was ‘recent’ then, no longer is. Where the text was too categorical or bossy, I have toned it down and made it more tentative.
And I have added a few things too. Some websites have been added to the ‘Useful Addresses’ section at the end; the original ‘Bibliography’ and ‘Practical Material’ sections have both been left – for historical interest – and there is a new ‘Useful Books / Sources of Ideas’ section … though several of the original books are still included here.
Enjoy!
Jane Revell,
Preface to the First Edition (1979)
I am a teacher of English as a foreign language and at the moment I am learning German as a foreign language in what I would say is a very ‘non-communicative’ way. For three whole hours every morning we listen to the teacher explain rule after rule before we move on to apply these rules in exercise after exercise in the book. In the street after the lesson, I need to know where the 53 bus stops. There is a lady coming. By the time I have managed to formulate my question in German, the lady has gone past. I ask the next passer-by, and expect short and easy-to-follow directions. Instead he says in German, ‘Oh you’ve just missed one. Actually I’m going towards the Haus der Kunst, so I could give you a lift if you like. My car’s right over there.’ ‘Wie bitte?!’ (Pardon?). I am unable to communicate successfully in German, even on a very simple level. Why? For the reasons let’s go back to the classroom.
In my German class I normally get to say something about once every hour, when I read out a sentence from an exercise or text. I always talk to the teacher and never to any of the other students, and I never decide what to say, as it’s written in the book for me. No wonder when I come out to face the real world I am thrown! It’s true that this is a very extreme example, and luckily, because I am living in Germany and surrounded by German, my German lessons are unlikely to be a permanent obstacle to successful communication in the language. For foreign learners of English outside an English-speaking environment, however, the problem could be a very serious one.
In coping with a foreign language, confidence plays a very large part. Students need to feel that they will be able to apply what they have learnt in the classroom to real life, and be able to tackle many different situations in a foreign language in a foreign country. It is up to the teacher to give the students this confidence, by providing plenty of opportunities for them to practise what they have learnt in as realistic a way as possible inside the classroom.
Very often teachers are tied to a specific book and are aiming to get their students through an exam which tests specific items in that book. Even in this situation, which is far from ideal, there is room for communicative activities, activities in which the students can transfer their learning to real situations.
Suppose the teacher is working with Alexander’s First Things First at Lesson 77, for example. Rather than just practise everything in the way suggested in the Teacher’s Book and move quickly on to the next lesson, the teacher might think about an activity where the students can practise the structures they have learnt (‘I want to …’ and, ‘Can’t you wait till … ?’) in a similar situation, but in a way which allows them to think and to use language more creatively. They could work in pairs, for example, one as the receptionist, who has some pages from a diary in which certain days and times are booked up, and one as the person who wants to make the appointment. Between them they must work out a suitable time.
The activities described on the following pages are of this type. They can be used on their own or they can be used alongside any standard textbook and slotted in at appropriate moments to provide a transfer stage in the lesson. They are activities (particularly the later ones), designed to give learners a chance to experiment with their new linguistic skills, to be more creative. Activities, in short, to bridge the gap between skill-getting in the classroom and skill-using in real life.
Communication is an exchange, between people, of knowledge, of information, of ideas, of opinions, of feelings. It takes place in a multitude of ways, from the writings of the weightiest tome to the merest flicker of an eyelid.
For genuine communication to take place, what is being communicated must be something new to the recipient, something that person does not know in advance. Com-munication is full of surprises.
It is this element of unexpectedness and unpredictability which makes communication what it is, and for which it is so hard to prepare the student by conventional teaching methods. It is true that there are a few fairly predictable responses: ‘Hello’ will produce one of a limited number of predictable replies, ‘Hello’, ‘Hi’, ‘Good morning’, etc. But these exchanges take place in a very small number of special situations – they are often social formulae, which serve to establish or maintain relations between the speakers rather than convey any earth-shattering information.
It is also true that we can often predict the semantic area of a response and even guess at key words which will come up. If, after a visit to the zoo, someone asks, ‘Did you see the reptiles?’, the response is likely to be in the general area of ‘zoo-going’ and animals, and words such as ‘snake’, ‘lizard’ and ‘crocodile’ might well occur.
In a lot of cases, however, responses are completely unpredictable. The question ‘Did you see the reptiles?’ could produce any of the following replies: ‘You bet we did. At £16.80 to go in, we made sure we got our money’s worth!’; ‘That reminds me, did you ring Aunt Nelly?’; ‘Oh, have you heard about John going to Kenya?’ etc. This sort of interaction is very often ignored in language teaching.
In the early days of TEFL, the emphasis was on the formation of language habits rather than on the development of communicative skills. Stimulus / response drills and the like encouraged learners to think that any given utterance has a set reply.
Although this type of classroom exercise is still valuable practice in formulating communications and ‘getting the tongue round’ stretches of language, it is a means to an end rather than an end in itself, and the transfer to real life is not automatic: an intermediate stage is called for. The sort of activities described in subsequent chapters of the book (see particularly Chapter 4), are designed to help bridge this gap.